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Premier Kathleen Wynne took aim at the Prime Minister’s resistance to boosting pensions Thursday at a $1,500-a-plate Liberal dinner that raised $3 million for a possible spring election.

Repeating her warnings retirees will face a “pension income crisis” as company pensions dwindle or shrink, the premier singled out Stephen Harper for resisting an “obvious” solution by expanding the Canada Pension Plan.

“Not so long ago it seemed that even the recently retired (federal finance minister) Jim Flaherty agreed,” Wynne said in a speech prepared for the Liberal party’s annual Heritage Dinner.

“But Stephen Harper has an ideological aversion to the CPP, so there is no federal leadership in this area.”

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Wynne promised to create an Ontario Pension Plan to fill retirement income gaps after the Conservative federal government said the fragile economy makes this a bad time to raise CPP premiums for employers and their workers.

“Too many people in their forties and fifties already know they can’t put away enough savings on their own,” she told a crowd of party activists, lobbyists and observers in a cavernous room at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, where Liberals convene this weekend for their annual meeting and election readiness seminars in case the minority government’s spring budget is defeated.

“Too many people in their twenties and thirties can’t save at all,” added Wynne, who has been pushing other provincial premiers to join the call for an enhanced CPP.

“I think, ultimately, there might be an appropriate national response, but we cannot wait for that.”

She later explained that getting traction on an enhanced CPP will probably take a different regime in Ottawa, perhaps Justin Trudeau and his Liberals, now the third party in the House of Commons.

“Whatever it takes — a new prime minister or a growing consensus across the country,” Wynne said.

Details of the Ontario pension scheme are expected in the upcoming spring budget from Finance Minister Charles Sousa, who has not yet set a date for his fiscal blueprint.

With the Progressive Conservatives pledging to vote against it, the budget needs assent from the New Democrats if the minority Liberals are to avoid a spring vote.

Wynne tried to frame a possible election campaign as a choice between her party, in power since 2003, and opposition parties she believes would take the province down a different path.

She accused Tim Hudak’s Conservatives of planning a “war on labour . . . to roll back the clock and return us to a time when government believed its top priority was to pick fights and create upheaval” and called New Democrats vague on their plans for a province that last went to the polls in 2011.

The premier, whose own government has been tainted by the scandal over cancelled power plants and is under fire for not bringing in a spring budget already, described Andrea Horwath’s NDP as “suspicious of business, untested in governing.”

Wynne repeated her pledge there will be no increases in the HST, gas taxes or income taxes for the middle class but it is expected Sousa’s budget, which needs revenue to fund promised expansions in public transit, will include new taxes on high-income earners above $150,000.

The weekend convention was originally slated for London in late January, but was delayed and moved to Toronto in anticipation of gathering Liberals in advance of a possible May or June election.

Seminars for party activists around the province include sessions on fundraising, getting voters to the polls, “communicating the Wynne brand,” and strategies for rural areas where the Liberals have been losing support.

In byelections last month, the Liberals lost the long-held riding of Niagara Falls to the NDP, and in August byelections lost Windsor-Tecumseh and London West to the New Democrats, and Etobicoke-Lakeshore to the Conservatives.

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